2.4 Flower Survey
The flower survey was carried out in the spring and autumn season during
the pollinator survey in the same transect. We made five quadrates of 10
m X 5 m in each sampling transect. For estimation of flower resource
abundance, we scanned insect pollinating herbs and shrubs in each
quadrate and identified genus and species levels. The cover of floral
resources in each quadrate was ranked between 1– 6 (Szigeti et al.,
2016). Rank 1 indicates very scarce, 2 for scarce, 3 for more or less
scarce, 4 for more or less abundance, 5 for abundance, and 6 indicates
extremely abundance. The flower resource abundance for each sampling
transect was calculated as
FLOWER=\(\sum_{i=1}^{n}\text{t.taxon}_{i}\ (\ t\ =mean\ of\ the\ rank\ of\ flowering\ plant\ of\ each\ transect).\backslash n\)2.5 Identification of Insect Pollinators
All the insect pollinators were identified to species level in the
laboratory using relevant keys from adjacent regions. Bingham, 1897;
Tadauchi & Matsumura, 2007; Williams et al., 2010; Imran et al., 2016;
Aslam et al., 2017; Ngat et al., 2017, and Kumari et al., 2018 for bee
specimens. Brunetti, 1923; Ghorpadé, 1994, 2016; Claussen & Weipert,
2003; Subhan, 2016; Sengupta et al., 2017; Hassan et al., 2019, 2020;
Sankararaman et al., 2020 for hoverflies and Smith, 2011 for butterflies
specimen’s identification.